


Little Deaths

by deathdefied



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-08
Updated: 2015-03-08
Packaged: 2018-03-16 21:52:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3504050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathdefied/pseuds/deathdefied
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A repost to AO3 of a fic I wrote in 2012. A wordy, poetic exploration of Garrus and Shepard's developing relationship during the events of ME2.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Little Deaths

The day he almost died still haunts him. Not in the way a ghost would haunt someone, or even the way a soldier would be haunted by post-traumatic stress. He does feel some fear or urgency and sometimes, when carefully working through hundreds of equations in his head, he can remember lying in his own blood, recall the taste of it, remember the lack of feeling in his face.

Of course he experiences those emotions. What lingers the most, however, is the echo of elation and surprise he felt when he stared down his scope and saw a ghost at the end of it. He should have been surprised to see the salarian professor who ran a clinic far down in the slums, or the scantily-armoured biotic with a barrier powerful enough to stop his concussive rounds right in their track, but all his surprise went to the one Commander Shepard, whom he deemed lost two long years ago. Despite knowing one slow move could result in his death in his sleep-deprived state, Garrus Vakarian allowed himself a heartbeat to feel every emotion he could at Shepard’s unveiling. She looked around, scanning the immediate area, calculating the best cover and the high points that would grant her an advantage, before cracking her knuckles and stepping forward.

But even that heartbeat of hesitation threw him off for the rest of Shepard’s rescue mission. Just when he thought it was over and he could return to the life he loved, a damn merc had to go and mutilate his face with a rocket. As he lay on the ground, breathing laboured, eardrums ringing, he couldn’t help but wonder if he was just imagining Shepard and her motley crew. He could still feel the vibrations of gunfire and had to wonder which mercs were still fighting when Archangel was dead. Surely he had drifted off to sleep, lapsed into a daydream in which his former Commander, confidant and tutor had come to his rescue. It couldn’t have been real.

And yet there she was. He inhaled deeply, waking from a murky black unconsciousness, turned to see her face contorted in surprise and worry and relief. She was promising him something, he could see her lips moving, but his ears were still ringing. And damn, he felt very vulnerable. He made a motion to grip his rifle, to get right back up and carry on fighting, but all his muscles screamed in protest. He was helpless to simply writhe in a pool of his own blood.

But now, months past what he thought was surely his death, he can reflect on the emotions he felt while staring down that scope. Surprise, of course—who could have known anyone had the ability to bring someone truly back to life, not just a husk?—disbelief, anger, distrust, and… longing. Sure, he had been alone for two years and had a hard time connecting even with his Omega squadmates, but…

When he first reflected on this longing, it had intimidated him. So many things had gone unsaid after Shepard died. Those things still went unsaid in the mere hour they had together before his life was the one on the line. And still, after his face was reconstructed and freshly bandaged, and two people who should have been corpses were staring at each other in the forward battery on the Normandy, another being given new life, a lump would form in his throat as he watched her walk away, the door sliding shut behind her. His mandibles would twitch anxiously as he tried to return to his calculations, only to find himself staring off into space for long periods of time.

Not that he doesn’t still stare off into space for long periods of time, even with his feelings out on the table for Shepard to see. He’d sit on the crates next to the battery’s console and stare at the corrugated steel floor, tracing the patterns that created alternating up and down arrows. They reminded him of his own name, the few times he’d seen Shepard write it down. It was just every so often, when she indulged in a pen or pencil rather than a datapad, and she’d stare off into space, carefully tracing his name in the English equivalent. Beginning with a large, broken O-shape, bifurcated with the familiar arrow-like letter. It was curious to him, the way she must think of him, in her human way, with English words, the understanding between them totally dependent on a translator.

But no, not totally dependent. He knew her in ways that words could never reach. They flowed together on the front line of a battle, tossing clips to the other just when the one ran out, knowing when one needed to round a corner to flank with a nod of the head, the one able to pick off an enemy just out of the blind spot of the other. The chemistry flowed into the bedroom as well. The two could end up breathless and barely able to gasp the other’s name, knowing just what sets the turian off or just what lights fireworks behind the human’s eyes. They were not want for verbal communication, and that only intensified their passion for the other.

The day he first saw his name on Shepard’s desk, with the arrow-shaped V-letter in the middle, he had to ask. Shepard laughed it off, as she is known to do. “I can’t doodle, so I find other ways to keep my hands busy while thinking,” she explains. She asked him to write his name in his own hand and he obliged. Carefully scripted blocky letters, seemingly shorter than the English equivalent, but it was hard to tell. She stayed quiet until he had finished and then simply asked him to teach her how to write it. Again, he obliged.

After Shepard came back from the dead and Garrus recovered from a near-death experience, she never had a dearth of questions to ask him. They started out as he expected them to, inquiring about her lost 2 years and how he’d held up. Poorly, of course, and even though he tried to tell her otherwise, she always had a way of seeing through his guise. He began to wonder if he was always this transparent or if Shepard just had a way of getting past his calm and cool demeanor. Turns out, it was the latter.

After surviving the suicide mission and salvaging the Normandy herself from another death, Shepard’s questioning only got more invasive. Her lust for knowledge had no edge. She prodded him about his childhood, Palaven, his time at C-sec, the turian military… And in the bedroom, she constantly wanted to know more about his body, more about himself, and what exactly made him tick.

The bedroom was the only place they were totally open with one another. Rank was not an issue; neither was keeping their relationship quiet for the sake of propriety. They grunted and sighed as their body’s worked against each other, their motions in rhythm, hands seeking out any bit of flesh or carapace that had not been touched. Shepard liked to refer to their climaxes as, darkly, “little deaths”, a term that first disturbed Garrus. It was poetic, sure, but considering how death was constantly seeking them out, he found it a little out of place. After a while, however (and after he discovered that Shepard had heard it in a song), it found its way into his own thoughts. When he would watch her back arch with a long sigh, eyes clamped shut, legs locked onto his hips, he found her term ‘little deaths’ to be so perfect for the value of its irony. In those moments when she was on top of him and he was buried deep inside her, neither one of them felt more alive. He loved the reassurance of her little laughs as she came off her climax, when she’d grasp her chest right where her heart was, feeling it race. Sometimes she’d grope around for his hand and press it to her chest instead, letting him feel her life rushing through her veins and how he caused it to race.

After their little deaths, they’d lay still for a long while, savouring any small muscular twitch that the other produced, knowing that it meant they were still alive, at least for another night. Shepard would continue with her invasive questioning, even in a post-coital torpor with her voice growing even softer and more distant. Garrus would patiently answer, his voice low but still rough, even as he himself drifted off. Their time spent asleep was restless and not looked forward to, but one of them would always wake to the other’s eyes, arms cradling and chasing away any nightmares about pain of betrayal. When Garrus called out in his sleep, yelling at dead squadmates to run and save themselves, Shepard wrapped her arms around his neck and crooned his name, a reassurance that it was just a nightmare. He focused on his name, how she must think of it with the broken circle and the downward arrow, and how he came to be in the arms of this alien.

A thousand little deaths just for one life.


End file.
